Identity-Staked Consensus and Collusion Resistance in Chartered Validator Sets: A Trust Model for Decentralised and Compliant Distributed Settlement Infrastructure

Abstract

Permissioned ledgers are commonly treated as centralised because admission is restricted. This paper separates permissioning from control distribution and proposes identity-staked consensus as a trust model for accountable settlement ledgers operated by chartered validators. The model treats validator identity as externally costly collateral: public legal identity, charter state, institutional reputation, liability, attributable audit exposure, a phase-indexed conditional identity-loss floor, and loss-realisation channels outside the protocol. It distinguishes this construct from proof-of-authority by formalising validator acts as actor constellations, public validator anchoring, affiliation-aware voting caps, threshold class coverage, per-member collusion margins, observer-supported detectability, bootstrap claim discipline, and a consensus/application enforcement boundary. The paper connects the model to a broader identity-infrastructure series: the actor-assurance paper supplies capability-gate evidence, the trust-anchor paper supplies public validator anchoring and assurance-at-time, and the delegated-authority paper can consume the ledger evidence record for mandate and model-attribution records.